The First Door

It’s 1:30 p.m., lunchtime in France. I wonder if it’s too early to whip a man. I lower the blinds, pull the velvet curtains—should I let my hair down or tie it up?

In the background, on the turntable, the Velvet. The origin and the form. The first time I listened to them, consciously enough to translate their lyrics, a door opened to another dimension—almost as exciting as the drugs they sing about. Finally, someone was showing me, in a vivid and descriptive sequence, what it feels like when someone injects themselves.

Kids from my generation grew up with a terrifying fear of needles in the schoolyard. Lou Reed preached over an electric, discordant, and heartbeat-like melody the journey of the anti-hero: a descent into hell, bodily liberation when the dose hits your brain, and one phrase, sharp and dry like a wave against the pier: “heroin is my life and it’s my wife.”

He had that ambiguous charm of capturing and hanging onto images now as diffuse and present as incomprehensible at the time: syringes among bushes, subtle trails of blood dropping over concrete pavements, imagery resting in a dead corner of my brain, hidden behind the terrace wall where, at six years old, I first saw the junkies on my street injecting themselves. I didn’t fully understand, but I absorbed, at least partly, that lemons always appear as a foretaste of the weapon.

Life passing fast, death, pain spreading through the body, disconnection, freedom and its absence, chains, twisted impulses like baroque columns, pathos—so much in a single song. The immeasurable power of first experiences.

Childhood and Early Experiments

Neither my universe nor my understanding were developed enough to cross the threshold of the second door, the one leading to BDSM. It seemed medieval to me. It took time to realize that Heroin and Venus in Furs touched at the extremities and diverged in the middle. I had to face violence, frustration, and the experience of pain in its many forms to understand that the Velvet’s songs were directly linked to human experience.

I was 12. I changed schools and spent some time confined at home. The girls in my class threatened me—they didn’t want me to steal their boys. When I saw them spray graffiti on a friend’s hair and set it on fire in front of me, I understood they were serious. They told me I was next. During my isolation, I rented all the forbidden films with stories of violence: Trainspotting, American History X, Natural Born Killers… I imagined a journey like Lou Reed’s, out of my body—if I’d had drugs, I would have taken them all together.

This is where I gathered my scant experience. My brother became my first object of torture. I would kidnap him, gag him on a chair. When I was home sick, I’d tie him with yarn and tell him to run free like my dog until he got caught on a door handle and no one came to help. I loved watching him suffer; I already had a cousin my age, so his presence seemed redundant.

Discovering BDSM

One day I woke up and decided to end my frustration. It felt logical and liberating: if I’d spent my life fighting at home, why wouldn’t I be ready for the kinksters at school? The previous summer, a guy had chased me from the pool and jumped at me to touch my butt. I kicked him hard and knocked his bike over. I had reflexes, strength; I just needed strategy. Mine was to become friends with the boys, to enjoy their protection.

They say to be a good top you must have been a bottom first—and it’s very true. Then came Saturday disco nights. Kisses and caresses on red velvet chairs intertwined with the blows I’d receive at home—not exactly from the sky—when I arrived drunk. I endured them stoically; my greatest defense was never shedding a tear, hiding it with ease behind the discotheque. Humiliation was the greatest insult.

Lou Reed sang: “the belt that does await you, Strike, dear mistress, cure his heart.” Could someone enjoy being beaten with a belt? The day my father tried, I left home.

The human brain relativizes and discards negative experiences to move forward, but some traumatic memories stay subtly attached, like fingerprints on the subconscious, creating nerve responses, alert states. It’s up to us to let traumas control our lives or be the rider who tames the horse.

Gratitude and Reflection

At 18, I left behind a gray, rainy city, skater boyfriends, and half my dealer friends with whom I spent afternoons watching the microwave shred hash and put ecstasy into packets. If there’s one thing I’m grateful for, it’s that until I came of age, they never let me snort a line. I left eager to explore new horizons, like when I used to peek behind the terrace wall—but without the junkies.

University years were a roller coaster, with richer but fortunately less violent sensations. I discovered drugs and tried almost all of them. I experienced all those journeys, with slips, highs, and lows. My slippery carpe diem mixed with hedonism—trying to make up for time lost under parental punishment—turned my brain into a soft, gelatinous place, like Dali’s clocks on a Sunday afternoon. I wandered dark alleys, met monsters that didn’t exist, but felt inevitably young and irresistibly sexual.

The Final Game

During my first post-university summer, at an after-party, I literally opened the second door I’d long kept closed. Before my eyes, a man gagged, full of clamps, tied to a wardrobe. That image etched into my brain. I returned to bed with the guy I was with and said, “people go crazy on drugs, you have to see this.” Minutes later, he came back and told me he was waiting for his dominatrix.

“Okay, let’s fuck,” I said, avoiding a conversation I barely understood. I knew nothing of whether what he told me was good or bad. I had read about domination, read Sade in college, knew that masochists enjoy pain, that some self-harm to feel physical pain dulls emotional pain—but my idea of BDSM was skewed and limited, reserved for gay darkrooms, satanic groups, and Marilyn Manson fans.

At that moment, doors and corridors connected in my mind. I entered the Velvet Underground’s backroom, where latex and leather, pleasure and pain, sweat and tears intertwined like the strands of an eight-tailed whip.

I revisited the songs, read books, magazines, and later, I discovered the transformative and telluric power hidden in BDSM—how elements can be reshaped to create pleasure through pain, how sex can become an almost mystical experience. I realized that martyrs in religious ecstasy were perhaps the first masochists.

Venus in Furs and Heroin spoke of the same journey: transcending the body, escaping reality, a departure from the self—though drugs were more socially accepted then.

I explored subspace, flow, how inflicted pain, others’ suffering, or humiliation could become release for someone else. Physical pain as relief from emotional pain, absolution of guilt, or a path to pleasure, light, and darkness—the eternal duality. Others find heaven, others hell (as A Course in Miracles says). The true miracle is a change in consciousness: seeing the same situation from a different perspective.

I had to experience inner pain, suffering, loss, desolation, anguish for the miracle to happen. Sometimes it felt like a burning thermostat inside me.

Mastery and Clients

That’s when the shift happened: I realized my hand, the one setting the pace, was ready to take the whip. I had mastered experience and could alchemize the elements. The first time I saw a woman under 6’ dominate a man twice her size at a massage parlor, I asked: “How do you feel?” “Very relaxed,” she replied. Then I understood: everyone reinterprets what they do, but passion is non-negotiable.

Many enter this world for money; only truth lasts. Those who think I torture men for fun or crave adoration are wrong. My clients rarely touch me beyond my latex gloves and legs. I always thank them for coming, for exposing themselves, for trusting me with their vulnerability.

I understand that it’s easier to put our thoughts into boxes because they give us security and reaffirm our beliefs. In the same way, I see this experience as part of my life, and life itself as a series of decisions—important or subtle, sometimes dystopian—signifying renunciation and acceptance. If you weren’t spending the last few minutes reading me, you’d probably be in front of another article or scrolling Instagram; if my next client hadn’t found me, they’d be standing before another door. Doors, like in Hermann Hesse’s theater of the absurd, open and close—but the decisions, desires, silences, and dead ends that pass between one action and a semi-torn or semi-contracted relationship in fleeting moments—the underlying space, the pause—is where Frankl said freedom resides. And I believe it’s in the pursuit of that magnanimous, absolute freedom, the one that travels through your body, that I dedicate myself.

My favorites are masochists. Each is a universe, a dopamine and adrenaline journey. I thank them all for courage, vulnerability, facing frustrations and fears, embracing darkness as part of the path toward pleasure, power, and rebirth after each ‘petite mort’.

The Ritual

Three minutes left. When I open the door and receive his offering, I’ll make him kneel and tell him, as always: the more pleasure he gives me, the more he’ll receive. It’s a two-player game. Then my intuition and inner power guide me.

I might tie him to a chair, handcuff him, make him desire my Louboutins, all the frustration of his fetish before him with no hands to touch. Then slowly sink my heel into his ass, merging him with his dark object of desire.

He wants me to whip him. I’ll spit in his face, ask him to masturbate in a corner—maybe I’ll let him cum on my hand. Sperm, the origin and the form.

Did you want something dirty and perverse? Jung says what we don’t integrate is presented as destiny, a projection game: I’ll be your mirror.

I'll Be Your Mirror